The advent and growth of the World Wide Web and networking software enable private individuals and business personnel to access information from an increasing number of sources, such as web servers, database servers, enterprise systems, and other forms of information storage systems. The information provides data for certain business processes. Accordingly, businesses rely on systems and techniques that ensure the correct data is generated and displayed as content on a user's computer display device.
To ensure the consistency of displayed information, businesses continue to harness various technologies associated with distributed systems to develop and provide specialized services. One type of technology that is gaining popularity are web services designed for business processes. A business web service is system functionality that is accessible over the Internet, an Intranet, and even an Extranet, using standard web-based protocols (e.g., Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP)). Such services may provide content that is configured and published using description languages, such as Hyper Text Transfer Markup Language (HTML) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) interfaces and messages. Accordingly, business process services are an ideal way for businesses to provide services in heterogeneous environments where a consumer of these services may be a user operating a desktop, an application program, or even another business process hosted on any number of different platforms.
Although service technologies allow businesses to publish and retrieve information through a network, the dynamic nature of business requires the information to be constantly updated. For example, a business that provides a product may offer a user manual for the product in the form of an electronic document (i.e., on-line user manual) provided on a Web page served by a Web server. Because the product may evolve into later versions, the business must in turn update the user manual. A simple update to the manual may require many changes to the content associated with the document. Further, problems may arise when different types of updates to the manual originate from different sub-entities of the business, such as a marketing division and a design and manufacturing division. Therefore, the business has to manage the changes originating from different sub-entities to ensure the document is created, edited, and published (e.g., served on the Web site) efficiently.
Accordingly, there is a need to for a mechanism that enables a business to create, edit, and manage document, and edit documents based on changes from different sources within or external to the business.